Kill Bill 115, urges student protest

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STUDENTS WANT BILL KILLED. Hundreds of students at Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School walked out of class on Tuesday, Dec. 11 to protest Bill 115, which they say jeopardizes their own future as well. (Photo by Louis Tam)

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STUDENTS WANT BILL KILLED. Hundreds of students at Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School walked out of class on Tuesday, Dec. 11 to protest Bill 115, which they say jeopardizes their own future as well. (Photo by Louis Tam)

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STUDENTS WANT BILL KILLED. Hundreds of students at Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School walked out of class on Tuesday, Dec. 11 to protest Bill 115, which they say jeopardizes their own future as well. (Photo by Louis Tam)

Hundreds of students at Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School walked out of class to protest Bill 115 early this week, a law which they say has put their own future and aspirations at risk.
Against the bitter cold of Tuesday, Dec. 11, students filed out of their classes at around 9:30 a.m. in a resounding show of support for their teachers, who now face a two-year contract from the province that takes away their right to collective bargaining. With extracurricular activities and athletics suspended indefinitely due to labour disruptions, students at the protest expressed concern that their pathways to higher learning are being jeopardized.
“A lot of kids are devastated because that was their whole life. Some of the Grade 12s were relying on that for scholarships,” rugby player Chris Carnduff said of the school’s sports teams. “That’s going to be a huge hit for them if they can’t get scholarships to go to university and stuff. If they don’t have their team, they can’t show their skills and they can’t practice.”
Carnduff was joined by school hockey team member Owen Nudd, who doesn’t see himself back on the ice anytime soon.
“It was just starting, and we were supposed to have a practice this Monday, but it was cancelled because of this bill thing,” he said. “I’m really upset.”
Student parliament prime minister Lauren Rainey said some senior students at the school had made a decision to stay an extra year in high school just to take advantage of extracurricular opportunities.
“It’s really unfortunate also for some people who are doing a victory lap – they came back for a year just to participate in sports,” she said. “And now they’re being cancelled as well. People are throwing away money they’ve put into it.”
Student parliament hospitality representative Keana Barclay said the labour disruptions have created a lot of anger and confusion within the student body, and that the hiatus on extracurricular activities means star athletes are unlikely to have a chance to prove their mettle in the upcoming Georgian Bay Secondary School Association athletics championships. Extracurricular activities, she said, are what keep many of the students on the right track academically.
“A lot of kids are really keen on participating in these because they actually help them focus better in school,” she said. “For our sports teams, you can’t be failing your classes, you have to have good grades. It’s actually helping out students.”
But even without extracurricular activities, student Darcy Deathune says she’s maintaining her support for the cause her teachers are fighting for.
“We still want to respect the teachers, it’s not their fault. We don’t want to just be out of their classes,” she said. “It’s not anything they can really do about it, their hands are tied.”
The protest was originally scheduled to take place a day earlier, but was postponed for a day as many school busses were halted due to a sudden downpour of freezing rain.
The protests were held on the same day that their counterparts at Gravenhurst High School did their own walkout, and took the picketing through the town’s downtown core.
Thomas Ruttan, a Grade 11 student, said the protests have been well received by teachers.
“All the teachers that I have talked about are glad that we’re doing it because we actually know what we’re talking about, we’re not just doing this … to skip class,” he said.
In both high schools, students used social media to organize the events and to communicate timely information with their colleagues. Some students at Muskoka Beechgrove Public School also staged a walkout of their own.
The student protests come just one week after teachers picketed outside Parry Sound-Muskoka MPP Norm Miller’s office in Bracebridge. Tomorrow (Thursday, Dec. 13), local elementary school teachers will be walking off the job in a one-day protest against the bill.
— with files from Jennifer Bowman